Force.com Tips and Tricks: A quick reference guide for administrators and developers to get more productive with Force.com

225 Pages·2013·3.67 MB·English

by  Abhinav Gupta

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Force.com Tips and Tricks
A quick reference guide for administrators and
developers to get more productive with Force.com
Ankit Arora
Abhinav Gupta
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
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Force.com Tips and Tricks
Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy
of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is
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Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages
caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the
companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals.
However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: February 2013
Production Reference: 1230113
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-84968-474-3
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Cover Image by Artie Ng ([email protected])
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Credits
Authors Project Coordinator
Ankit Arora Leena Purkait
Abhinav Gupta
Proofreaders
Aaron Nash
Reviewers
Naveen Gabrani Maria Gould
Srikanth Goati
Aruna A. Lambat Indexer
Monica Ajmera Mehta
Caleb Poitevien
Karanraj Sankaranarayanan
Graphics
Dianne Siebold
Valentina D'silva
Acquisition Editor
Production Coordinators
Rukhsana Khambatta
Melwyn D'sa
Nilesh R. Mohite
Lead Technical Editor
Dayan Hyames
Cover Work
Melwyn D'sa
Technical Editor
Nilesh R. Mohite
Prasad Dalvi
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About the Authors
Ankit Arora (@forceguru) is an avid Force.com-certified professional who
has been working on the platform since 2008. Since then, he has been involved in
architecting, building, and implementing Force.com solutions for on-premise and
AppExchange applications. He has also won many online challenges rolled out by
Salesforce such as TwitterTrivia, Hammer of Thor, and CloudTrivia.
Ankit is a Force.com MVP (Most Valuable Professional) and leader of Jaipur
Salesforce Platform Developer Users Group. He has been contributing to the
Salesforce community in various ways and through various channels. He is
passionate about Force.com and exhibits this by actively blogging at forceguru.
blogspot.in. He is acting as moderator on the Salesforce Discussion Boards
and shares his knowledge and experience by providing effective and converging
solutions to developer queries. He has submitted many cookbook recipes that can be
found in the online Force.com Cookbook.
Ankit resides in Jaipur, also known as the pink city, located in Rajasthan, India, a
city that has been able to maintain its rich heritage from the times of Maharajas, yet
picking up the pace to emerge as a strong contender for one of the fastest growing
cities in India. Ankit lives with his family and likes to play first person combat games
such as Counter Strike in his free time. He is an enthusiast sportsman and a national
level player in the online Counter Strike competition.
Though only my name appears on the cover of this book, a great
many people have contributed to its production. In particular, I
would like to thank my brother-in-law Ajay Deewan, for being my
greatest teacher, mentor, and for helping me throughout the book.
His patience and support helped me overcome many crisis situations
and finish this book.
Finally I would like to thank my family and friends for
supporting me.
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Abhinav Gupta is a solution architect and an expert cloud computing consultant.
He is a Force.com contributor and an avid blogger. He actively participates on Force.
com discussion boards, blogs about cloud computing, Salesforce.com, and open
source technologies at http://www.tgerm.com, and also contributes to various open
source projects.
Abhinav has specialized in both native Force.com app development and B2B/B2C
integrations with other platforms/APIs. His area of expertise is not only limited
to Force.com; he has also done quality work on other cloud platforms such as
developing JEE apps on Heroku, Amazon Web Services (EC2, BeanStalk, and so on),
and Google App Engine. He is a Force.com MVP with notable achievements that
include creating the Code Share project Tolerado, winning third place in the 2010
Salesforce Developer Challenge with his mobile location sharing application, and
frequently being mentioned in the Salesforce.com newsletter and blog.
Abhinav lives in India with his wife and three-year-old daughter, and enjoys reading
technology books and magazines and playing computer games.
Thanks to my wife for being supportive and compromising her time
and weekends to spare me for the book, my little daughter for all
the fun and naughtiness she spreads around, my mom and dad for
all the affection and care, and last but not least the Packt Publishing
team and editors for their patience and cooperation throughout the
book writing process.
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About the Reviewers
Naveen Gabrani is a Force.com architect and is founder of the Salesforce consulting
company Astrea IT Services. Astrea is a leader in providing Salesforce.com services.
Astrea has three products on AppExchange, Smart vCard, Astrea Clone, and Object
Hierarchy, which were envisioned by Naveen. Naveen has 20 years of experience in
the IT industry in various technical and management positions.
Srikanth Goati is a Salesforce-certified professional and co-founder of Salesforce
Hyderabad User Group. Currently, he is working as a Salesforce administrator with
Y-Axis Solutions Pvt Ltd, Hyderbad, AP, India.
Srikanth is an MCA Graduate from Hyderabad. He has acquired the Salesforce
Certifications DEV401 and ADM201. He is one of the top three bloggers in the
Salesforce community. He has conducted Salesforce training sessions for more than
350 users in his company.
Overall, he has more than 2 years of experience in Salesforce.com development
and administrating. He has experience in the Sales cloud, Service cloud, Apex,
Visualforce, Database.com, Site.com, and Customer portal.
Internally in his company, he has written more than 50 training manuals on different
modules of Salesforce.com.
I wish to thank my parents Prakash and Nagamani and all family
members, friends, colleagues, for all the joy they bring into my life.
Thanks to my Salesforce community friends.
Thanks to the folks at Packt Publishing, the authors of this book,
and the many others who have provided help and inspiration
along the way.
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Aruna A. Lambat is an enthusiastic Technical Leader working on Salesforce.com
technology with a profound understanding of software design and development. She
is passionate about building better products and providing excellent services leading
to healthier customer satisfaction.
She has been working on the Salesforce.com platform since 2008. She entered into IT
in 2004 as a student. She completed her Master's Degree in Computer Applications
from the state Maharashtra, India. She has been working in the IT industry since
2007. She started her carrier as a Java developer and later shifted her focus to cloud
computing, specifically in Salesforce.com. She is a Sun-certificated Java developer,
web component developer, and Salesforce-certified developer. She is a regular
contributor to the Salesforce developer community. She helped the author to cite the
example in the book, Force.com Developer Certification Handbook (DEV401).
Aruna works for HCL Technologies; it is primarily engaged in providing a
range of outsourcing services, business process outsourcing, and infrastructure
services. Aruna works as a Lead Consultant on Salesforce.com technology-based
customer services.
Aruna resides in Pune, the cultural capital of Maharashtra, also known for its
educational facilities and relative prosperity. She is from Nagpur, the orange city.
Her parents staying in the heart of the orange city. She completed her education in
this city and achieved success at different time points in her career with immense
support from her parents Mr and Mrs Anandrao Lambat. Aruna loves travelling for
nature visits, reading fiction books, playing pool, and roaming with friends in her
free time.
Aruna can be contacted at:
• Gmail: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: Aruna Lambat
• Twitter: @arunalambat
• Facebook: /aruna.lambat
My special thanks to Siddhesh Kabe for his help and providing me
the opportunity for a little contribution for his book, which in turn
provided me with the opportunity to work for further Salesforce
books from Packt Publishing.
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Karanraj Sankaranarayanan is a certified Salesforce.com developer and works
full time at Tiara Consulting Services (I) Pvt Ltd, Chennai, the Indian operations of
Tiara Consulting headquartered in California, USA. Karan holds a Bachelors Degree
in Engineering from Anna University with a specialization in Computer Science. He
is passionate about the Salesforce platform, an active member/contributor of the
Salesforce customer community/developer forum, and writes blogs. He is also the
leader of the Chennai Salesforce Developer user group based in Chennai, India. He
can be reached via Twitter (@karanrajs).
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